Mobile devices offer users the ability to wirelessly communicate with others and have become increasingly popular. These devices have traditionally permitted the user to place and receive telephone calls. However, mobile devices have become increasingly sophisticated and now include a wide variety of information/data, such as email messages, SMS messages, and photographs, for example. Given that the amount of information found on the mobile device has increased, and at least in some cases has become more sensitive, mobile devices are sometimes locked to prevent access. Unlocking the mobile device frequently calls for inputting a valid passcode to gain access to information and/or features of the mobile device.
In some situations, requiring entry of the passcode each time a user wants to accesses the mobile device can be unnecessary and time consuming. In many applications, the mobile device restricts access to its information and/or features after the device has been inactive for more than a predetermined amount of time (e.g., >1 minute). But mobile device users may want to temporarily deactivate the passcode. For instance, the user may be in a environment where he or she accesses the mobile device relatively frequently and security is less of a concern. In that case, a low security threat to the mobile device along with the burden of entering a passcode may justify temporarily disabling the passcode requirement. However, many email servers have security policies in place that do not permit the user to deactivate the passcode requirement and even when such deactivation is allowed the user would have to modify the settings of the mobile device to suspend the passcode requirement and then remember to re-activate the passcode requirement later. If the user forgot to re-activate the passcode requirement, the information stored on the mobile device could be unsafe when the phone is no longer located in the low-security environment.